Mr Archie Hesse, Chief Executive Officer of Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement System (GhIPSS), has urged organsations to avail themselves to the various electronic payment options available to check fraud.

He said while payment by cash and cheque leaves room for a lot of manipulations, the electronic form of payment had a lot of audit trails to track various payments to the very minute detail even in the event of fraud.

Mr Hesse, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Accra on Thursday, said GhIPSS would soon deploy a lot of Point of Sales (POS) terminals in the country which would accept both local ATM and e-zwich cards.

He said with the deployment of these POSes; the public would be able to use their normal ATM cards to make payments, instead of using cash. “This will reduce the incidence of officials handling cash and the temptation to squander it,” he added.

Mr Hesse called on institutions that receive payments to secure the hybrid POSes so that their customers could make payment electronically. He explained that unlike the e-zwich card, which requires that the holder loads electronic funds onto the card before it can be used, the hybrid POS will accept the normal ATM cards already linked to the bank accounts.

“Almost every bank account holder with our universal banks has an ATM card, so once there is a POS, they would just use their ATM and pay and that money hits the bank account of the service provider directly, no cash and no temptation to steal,” Mr Hesse said.

He appealed to companies and organisations which receive cash to ask their banks to get them these hybrid POSes. Mr Hesse said a concessionary facility provided by KFW of German could also be accessed in order to purchase these hybrid POSes.

He said the cost companies and organizations incur in transporting cash could be avoided once they had POSes. GhIPSS has successfully test-run the hybrid POSes, and is going through a process of certification with the banks, some of which have long completed the process. Mr. Hesse said soon the public would see these POSes at vantage points, as Ghana seeks to operate a modern payment system.